Amanita

The favorite warrior of the Crimson Blight Faction, a group of Plague zealots who served the Plaguebringer so aggressively and with such corruption in their ranks, that they earned widespread disdain, including amongst the other Plague exalts (who the faction themselves succinctly deemed "spineless disgraces", for not doing "whatever it takes" to serve the Plaguebringer). The Crimson Blight Faction was both powerful and alienating, and those who join it are locked into this path until they draw their last breath. Anyone who tried to leave was hunted and struck down. Amanita often led these hunts.

Every runaway paid for their "cowardice" and "betrayal", and none ever escaped.... until one did.

Basalt was one of the Blight's darlings, showing such promise and enthusiasm that the day he fled was a shock to the entire faction. The leader, an Imperial with a sickly pallor and blood red wings, was beside himself with rage, and Amanita was furious as well. The hunters, however, lost him in the Sunbeam Ruins, and Amanita had to make the humiliating decision to give up and turn around, lest the failed hunt wiped out the faction's strongest and fastest warriors in a hostile landscape.

Amanita never stopped dwelling on what happened, nursing a wound of anger and indignity. It was such that years and years, so many years later, when she heard talk of a dragon that matched his description at the bottom of the world, in a frosty sanctuary that put followers of each and every deity on a podium to speak to willing ears, her blood boiled and her fury bloomed anew.

And thus, she brought the toughest of the Crimson Blight's ranks to ambush their quarry in the frozen mountains. She knew that Basalt would be strong, but she never would have dreamed that the florid, delicate, kindly dragons he surrounded himself with in this pathetic bleeding-heart sanctuary would be stronger. And not only that, she was beset by dragons that wouldn't have looked out of place in her home in the wastes, indistinguishable from her own brethren but for their softened hearts and loyalty to this place. The dragons of the faction also underestimated the toll that the landscape and the long journey would take on them.

It wasn't far into the confrontation that she realized that her assumptions, her narrowminded ideas of weakness and strength, had doomed the hunting party. She watched in horror as the hunters - prideful, angry - refused to give up and then fell. And then she did something different, something she never imagined that she would ever do: she surrendered.

In that moment, she had forsaken everything about the life she lived. She would never be accepted back into the faction. She may even be hunted by it's new recruits, knowing that the faction never forgives and certainly never forgets. But her mind was spinning. Wondering. As she was escorted to a guarded room beneath the castle, she couldn't help but think about how she felt more free now than she had in her life. Free from the haunting rage. Free from the fate to serve the Crimson Blight Faction until her inevitable grisly death. Free from the relentless judgement, the overbearing standards, the pressure to think a certain way or be a 'heretic' or 'weakling' or 'coward'. She didn't have to return. This is her escape.

Amanita couldn't help but think that she could convince these dragons to let her start over, and learn a new kind of strength.

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Scatter Journey:
Start - Teal/Beige/Some grey range I forgot to write down (Charcoal?)

1. Caramel/Fuchsia/Platinum
2. Mint/Pear/Sanguine
3. Stonewash/Peach/Dirt - Matchy
4. Brown/Violet/Silver
5. Oilslick/Robin/Ginger - Oilslick could've been so nice
6. Sapphire/Maize/Spearmint
7. Antique/Mantis/Hunter - Weird matchy
8. Honeydew/Navy/Tangerine - this poor dragon has known suffering
9. Flaxen/Latte/Shadow - This is it, this works haha